


"I love you" / please do not use it.

by stuckwithminusharry



Series: One Hundred Ways To Say I Love You (Hinny) [6]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 100 Ways to Say I Love You Writing Challenge, Auror Trainee Harry Potter, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Humor, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Getting Back Together, I Love You, Opening Up, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Quidditch Player Ginny Weasley, Saying I Love You, Summer, Teen Romance, The Burrow, Tom Riddle's Diary, Vulnerability, first I love you, past trauma, the weasleys - Freeform, the whole package really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 09:02:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18807994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stuckwithminusharry/pseuds/stuckwithminusharry
Summary: It should change more than it does, that they're two people who love each other and who know it, not merely kids, trying to figure out who they've become in each other's absence. It doesn't. This whole time, they’ve been people trying to figure out how to love each other. That's why they're here, trying. Working for it. (Rated T for f bombs.)





	"I love you" / please do not use it.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I finished writing this partly on the doubledecker bus back home and partly on my bedroom floor drinking tea, because that's my life right now. Not a soul proofread this because I'm a big dumb Gryffindor like that.
> 
> This is for "I love you" off the 100 Ways To Say I Love You prompts list. I started this off with a few lines of a poem that reminds me of Ginny a lot and that I also take no credit for. It was written by Savannah Brown, and you can read it in full here, if you fancy: https://stuckwith-harry.tumblr.com/private/184778443123/tumblr_pra7bgR9nU1seoies
> 
> Enjoy!

“ **I love you” / please do not use it.**

 

i have given you the power  
to turn me inside out, my dear –  
please do not use it

“organs”, savannah brown

 

Summer 1998

 

“Well, that’s a view I could definitely get used to.”

With that, Ginny puts down the copy of the Daily Prophet she’s been flicking through and hops off the kitchen counter. The boys have brought a surge of warm yellow light into the Burrow: it gushes into the room until Ron shuts the door on it, an eager child tapping its sunbeams on every windowpane. He lets out something like a good-natured groan when Ginny brushes past him to kiss Harry hello (“I’m also here!” – “Yeah, and I’m not kissing you.”), but Harry seems more than happy to push the limits of Ron’s patience a bit, swiftly reaching up to cup her face with his hands.

“How was it?”, Ginny asks when they’ve broken apart, looking him up and down. “How’s it feel being an Auror?”

“We’re trainees”, Harry reminds her, resting his arms on her shoulders. Ginny tolerates it, wrinkling her nose at him, very aware that he’s taking advantage of how short she is. “In the summer program.”

“Summer program suits you”, Ginny tells him, pleased to see that a deep, raspberry-coloured blush works its way up Harry’s neck. She only begrudgingly turns away from the sight. “Ron – go easy on Mum when you see her, alright?”

Ron, who is evidently keen to give them some space, has just about made it to the first flight of stairs when he looks over his shoulder. “Bad day?”, he mutters.

Ginny nods and turns back to Harry. Quietly, she says: “Well, that, but also …”

“The Quidditch thing”, finishes Harry, who’s been around for plenty of shouting matches surrounding the topic. “How’s that coming along?”

“So, I found out about a few exhibition matches next month”, Ginny says. “Young talent recruitment sort of thing. And I’m gonna go if it kills me. Mum can say what she wants.”

“As soon as you’re a world famous Quidditch player, she’s going to buy every t-shirt with your name on it that she can get her hands on, just you wait.”

Ginny smiles warmly at him. “Will you?”

“I’m already saving up for a poster.”

That makes her feel warmer and fuzzier than she really cares to admit, and she stands on her tiptoes to kiss him again. Much to her dismay, he seems to have something else on his mind. “Uh, can we talk?”

“I – yeah, what’s up?”

He doesn’t respond right away, so Ginny lets him lead the way up into her room with furrowed brows, loosely entangled hands swinging between them. They sit cross-legged on the camp bed that he definitely doesn’t sleep in anymore – hasn’t for a while now.

It’s a small miracle they’ve been able to keep up the hoax this long, considering.

“It’s about, well, this”, he says, vaguely gesturing to his Auror robes.

Ginny squints at him. “Are you trying to seduce me? Because as much as I –”

Harry buries his face in his brown hands when she wiggles an eyebrow at him, though she can definitely see him grin behind them.

“Okay, hold that thought”, he mutters, and Ginny snickers. “Let me say this first.”

He clears his throat.

“Look, I – I know we talked about it all, but I need to make sure you’re okay with this.”

It’s true: there’s been a lot of talking since he came home. Talking under the willow trees by the lake in the last of the sunset, talking in the middle of the night, lying on Ginny’s bed with entangled limbs. Talking at the edge of the Forbidden Forest after the funerals. Talking on the bench by the front door of the Burrow in the morning grey, when sleep leaves them too soon, or when it never came.

A lot of not talking, too.

Ginny’s pretty sure she knows what he’s referring to, so she says: “It was one stupid article, Harry. I told you I know what I’m getting myself into, and, honestly, I don’t care about it nearly as much as you think.”

They spent one afternoon in London and found their faces on the front page of Witch Weekly the next day. The headline read _Ginny Weasley: The Chosen One’s Chosen One?_

Ginny thought it was a bit pathetic. And a bit hilarious.

Harry didn’t.

“It’s not that. Well, it kind of is. Look – it’s me who decided to get the most dangerous job the Ministry’s got to offer, and you’re the one who gets to live with it. It’s not … fair.”

Ginny sighs. “I’ve known that this is what you wanted to do for years, Harry. I’ve had plenty of time to think about it.”

“I could die, you know”, he says bluntly, like maybe he thinks she isn’t perfectly aware that that’s exactly what this is about, like her heart doesn’t throw up every time she thinks about it. “Every time I go on a mission, I might not come back, or I could be injured so badly I never wake up again, or not remember who I am, or who you are, and it’s – so much – to ask of you.”

“Bit dramatic”, Ginny says. “I could always fall off my broom and break my neck.”

For a second there, he just looks exasperated, and then he lets himself break into a reluctant grin until he’s snorting with laughter.

“You’re – you’re amazing, I love you.”

“Good one.”

It hits her like the Hogwarts Express at full speed, knocking her flat on the face, but too late.

_I love you._

_Good one._

Oh, Merlin.

“Ginny –”

“I was kidding, obviously”, she says. “I’m too good a Quidditch player.”

“O-Obviously.”

 

*

 

“And your response was ‘good one’.”

Ginny gives Hermione’s back the stink eye as they step into Flourish & Blotts, bell ringing over their heads.

Today is largely the product of a shouting match, too, her mother having her trod along while Hermione picks out her school supplies, clearly hoping Ginny might have an epiphany and change her mind about throwing Hogwarts to the winds, or maybe just that Hermione would wear her down eventually. In exchange for that, however, Molly begrudgingly agreed to let Ginny go to all the recruitment matches she wants, and not to utter a single bad word about it.

Ginny’s decided to count that as a win.

Not that Hermione hasn’t been giving it her all. Bringing up Harry was Ginny’s very last resort, and while it’s accomplished the impossible and taken Hogwarts entirely off Hermione’s mind, this particular conversation has turned out to be a very high price to pay.

“Wipe the judgement off your face, I’m in a real crisis here!”

Hermione turns around with a look of fond exasperation, Australian tan lines fading at the neckline of her t-shirt. She hands Ginny a stack of books.

“He told you he loves you and your response was ‘good one’ and somehow he still wants to be with you? Ginny, marry him.”

“Not helping, Hermione.”

Hermione consults her list of mandatory reading again, then her significantly longer list of background reading material that Ginny is pretty sure she compiled herself. “Over here.”

She looks over her shoulder as they head into the next aisle and says: “You’re not surprised, are you?”

“If I’d seen it coming, you think I’d have said ‘good one’?”, Ginny says, loud enough for Hermione to frantically shush her.

A girl and her bookshop, Ginny thinks grumpily.

“I _meant,_ are you surprised he _feels_ that way?”, Hermione asks, like maybe if she says it very slowly and intentionally it’ll get through Ginny’s thick skull.

“No, I just –”

_Wasn’t expecting him to say it?_

Was she?

“Look, Ginny, if it helps – I’ve known Harry half my life, and this isn’t something he’d say lightly, I’m sure of it.”

Ginny doesn’t bother to try and explain she already knows that, because she knows Harry, so it’s not like she actually believed even for a second that he was joking, or that he ever would. That’s not the problem at all.

Not that there’s a problem.

“So, you haven’t said it back”, Hermione says, way too matter-of-factly for Ginny’s liking.

Yeah, all this really doesn’t make her look good.

And Ginny _hates_ it. In every daydream she’s ever had about it, she beats him to it, and it’s _Harry_ who’s left speechless – though, to his credit, she always figured he’d end up having a response better than “good one” up his sleeve. Not that he’s one for romantic monologues, really, but he’s not an idiot. In her daydreams, she can watch his whole face soften, the way it does sometimes when he’s listening to her family banter over the dinner table and doesn’t know she’s watching him, when he doesn’t feel threatened and he’s not thinking about rogue Death Eaters or the Auror program and he forgets that he’s the Chosen One.

She tells him, and he says it back, and it’s bold and true and _easy._ It should be.

It is.

“As if you and Ron have said it”, she mutters.

Hermione blushes a pale shade of pink. “We have, actually.”

Ginny looks at her, stunned. “You _have?_ When?”

“The day after the battle.”

“ _Hermione!”_

“What? It had been … a long time coming, frankly, there was no point in waiting.”

Ginny takes a step back, grinning. “This is my brother we’re talking about? You’re sure you didn’t confuse him for one of the other ones?”

Hermione unceremoniously hands her three more books, blush intensifying by the second. “Don’t be so mean to him. He got there before you did.”

“Yeah, he’s never gonna let me live that down”, Ginny mutters, setting down Hermione’s books on a nearby chair. “Not _one_ word to him, you hear me?”

Hermione just smirks and makes her way to the next aisle.

“Look, it’s not that simple, alright?”, Ginny tells the bushy head of brown hair she’s following around the bookshop with crossed arms. It’s a good thing she can’t see the pity on Hermione’s face, she thinks, but she just _knows_ it’s there.

“Why not?”, Hermione says, turning around. “You _feel_ it back, don’t you?”

“So what if I do?”, Ginny says, heart racing like it’s running a fucking marathon.

Hermione sighs and pats her arm before turning away again. Ginny has several things to say to her about being treated like a five-year-old, about how Hermione isn't helping and definitely doesn't know what the hell she's talking about, because how could she, how it’s not about Harry or the way she feels about him that the words get stuck at the back of her throat.

But she stands in the silence of the dusty old bookshop with crossed arms, glaring at Hermione’s back, and her traitorous bastard of a heart is drumming behind her ribcage like it’s leading a goddamn parade.

 

*

 

He’s pouring over practice case files with Ron when they get back, his back turned to the open living room door. Hermione gives her a nudge in passing, some sort of gentle encouragement, maybe, and Ginny really wants to throw a fit about it, because she’s not a nutter for this, goddamnit, because Hermione really doesn’t know the half of it – but there are more pressing matters right now.

He doesn’t turn around right away, but he notices her enter: she can tell, because he stiffens. He does that now when he knows someone’s standing behind him, and he _always_ knows.

Ginny knows that’s not an Auror thing.

“I need to talk to you”, she says, poking him in the shoulder.

He looks at her, face dangerously soft in the late light. “Sure.”

Ginny makes a very conscious effort not to look at Ron, who opens his mouth but remains mercifully silent. She holds out an open hand, and Harry reaches for it without hesitation. Together, they step outside into the evening and sit on the bench by the front door, where they can watch the chicken peck the dry ground for seeds. Ginny pulls his hand into her lap.

She catches him fight a smirk at the familiar gesture and waits until he lifts his eyes to her. When he does, and she says it, it’s intentional and right and entirely because she wants to.

„I do love you.” She juts out her chin as though ready to fight him on it - and needing him to realise this is it, this is real, this is happening.

Harry’s eyes flicker away, but only for a second. „Look, you don’t – _have_ to say it back if you don’t want to. It’s fine. I don’t care.“

Ginny raises an eyebrow at him. “For an aspiring Auror, you’re a pretty shit liar, you know that, babe?”

He looks down at her hands, firmly holding his own. “So … ‘good one’?”

Ginny sticks out her tongue at him, which makes Harry grin faintly.

“I was scared”, she says. “And I’m sorry, for being an idiot.”

“You”, he says. „Scared. That’s funny.”

He keeps his eyes on their hands, brown thumb softly drumming on her freckled one, but Ginny doesn’t look away.

“I don’t think”, she says softly, “that you know how … _endlessly_ I adore you. It terrifies me a bit sometimes. And it terrifies me even more that you might know how much.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s an awful lot of power to give someone over you.”

Harry does not ask. Judging by the look on his face, he doesn’t need to.

Ginny could kiss him.

But all those nights and days, all the hours this summer they’ve spent talking, they’ve learned to lay bare what they can. They’re never great at it, but what they do say, they take at face value. They don’t push, and they don’t get defensive. They let it sit in the space between them, however dark and ugly and painful to hear. They say everything they possibly can, try and explain it with all the words they’ve got, and they let it be exactly what it is.

Ginny thinks they’re pretty good at that part, actually.

In rushed, clipped sentences, Harry explains the Horcrux that’s been living inside him. It’s a terrible, terrible thing, and all the conversations around it make Ginny’s jaw ache with the effort not to cry. That’s not even the worst part.

The worst part is that Harry looks the same and doesn’t believe it. And that it’s all terribly familiar, the way he throws himself down rabbit holes some nights.

“Every time I yelled at Ron and Hermione, or at you, do you think it was _him_ making me like that, that he was –”

“How do I know for _sure_ that it’s all gone, that he hasn’t – broken something permanently –”

Ginny sits by his side for all of it.

“Is that why you liked me, because I reminded you of him?”, he mutters one night, eyes blurry and bloodshot.

That last one hurt more than she cared to admit. There are nights and days when she wonders if that’s who he sees when he looks at her: a stupid eleven-year-old who found a friend in a Diary and cried like hell when she lost him. Ginny hasn’t been that girl for years, and one of these days, she thinks, she’s going to have to make absolutely sure he knows that.

He’s not who he was back then, either, summer afternoons light as feather spent in hidden corners of the castle after class. He’s older, and he’s hurting, and he has a life and a future ahead that he can’t see for himself yet.

He feels different, but not in the way he thinks. Ginny hasn’t quite figured out how to convince him of it yet.

“I’m not the Diary”, he says, before Ginny can open her mouth.

Ah, she thinks. There it is.

“I’m aware, thanks.”

It comes out harsher than she really wants it to, indignation poking through every syllable despite her best efforts to swallow it. Harry, at least, seems to realise how much his words stung, judging by the look on his face, and maybe, just maybe, Ginny is even willing to let herself believe that he understands why.

“Look”, she says, “I know you won’t use it against me, not on purpose.”

She really, really believes that.

“But you wouldn’t be the first one to do so, either. It’s just … really, really backfired before. Making myself vulnerable like that. So it’s the tiniest bit scary to admit that if you wanted to, you could absolutely rip out my heart and stomp on the bits, and there’s absolutely nothing I can fucking do about it.”

Harry doesn’t seem to know what to say to that, so he does what they always do: he lets it sit there. Takes it in. This is who she is.

“It wouldn’t even be very hard for you”, she says. “You really just have to change your mind, or leave, or - die. It’ll be really hard to keep up the impression that I’m cool and intimidating if you do.”

Harry grins faintly.

“You did die”, she says softly, furious that it dares to come out all weak and shaky, and even worse, that Harry notices, looking a bit alarmed as he shifts on the bench next to her. “I saw you. You were _dead_. And I really don’t ever want to feel that ever again.”

It’s not a sight she’s ever going to forget, his small, skinny body dangling in Hagrid’s arms. He was gone for so long he became see-through and impalpable in her memory: and then he was made of skin and flesh and bones again, a real human boy, and one whose every bone could snap, whose skin could tear, whose heart could fail him, in an instant.

“But it turns out I love you. Sort of a lot, actually.”

His eyes shift over to her, stupidly hopeful.

“And I wanted to tell you.”

There’s a bit of a silence, as they let it sink in.

“I liked to think that I was telling you this whole time, just … not with words.”

“You were”, Harry says to her surprise. “With everything you’ve done these last few weeks, I … I didn’t want to let myself believe it. But I understood.”

“Well, you were right”, Ginny says. “I love you.”

His face does soften the way she figured it would, like maybe he’s just beginning to let himself believe it, finding out what it feels like if he does. She really hopes he does. And she wants to sit here and look at him and think about how he’s the most beautiful boy she’s ever seen, and to tell him she loves him about fifty more times, because she does. But there’s something else she needs to say: and this is, after all, what they’ve been trying so hard to teach each other to do, hoping it would help fit the pieces back together. So she says it all, so it's out there.

“If something happens to you”, she says, “I’m going to survive that.”

“Gin -”

“My life won’t end, even if yours does”, she says, and this one comes out a lot less shaky because she makes a point of saying it as loudly and firmly as she can. She needs the both of them to believe this. “But, Harry, I wouldn’t be okay for a very long time, and it scares the shit out of me.”

This is who she is now.

“I do need to know you’d be okay without me", he says. "Eventually, at least.”

Ginny squeezes his hands with exactly the kind of grim determination that usually makes him smile like an idiot. “You could try not fucking dying for a change. But yes. I promise. And while it’s highly unlikely, because I’m _really_ good at Quidditch, I guess it’s not _entirely_ unfathomable that I might actually fall off my broom, so it’s not like all the pressure is on you here.”

He smiles.

“If it’s any consolation”, he says, “I’m not planning on changing my mind.”

“Yeah”, Ginny says. “I got that part.”

Somehow, they’ve ended up sitting cross-legged on the bench, facing each other. This whole time, they haven’t let go of each other’s hands.

Ginny remembers summer afternoons two years ago, when they lay in the grass by the lake, squinting in the sunlight as they watched the Giant Squid splash around the lake from afar. How effortlessly their hands would find each other and move together. She would point out a cloud she thought looked funny (“that one looks like Snape’s nose if you squint really hard”) and somehow, his hand always seemed to know where hers would end up, meeting her there.

Their hands don’t move as easily anymore. She never knows where his will go now - it doesn't all work as smoothly and wordlessly anymore. But she's never going to stop working at it.

“Love you”, she mutters, feeling to warm and fuzzy to care about the dopey smile she can’t seem to keep off her face. It gets lighter and easier every time she says it.

This is Harry.

“Good one.”

“Alright, that’s it”, she says, getting to her feet, “nice knowing you, Harry.”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding! I earned it, though, I –”

And then she turns around and he’s kissing her. It’s brash and earnest and messy, Ginny grabbing a fistful of his hair without thinking. They tumble around over the dry grass a bit, holding on for dear life.

"I know it's early", he says when they break apart.

Ginny considers this. “I don’t care”, she tells him truthfully. "I meant what I said."

It should change more than it does, that they're two people who  _love_ each other and who know it, not merely kids, trying to figure out who they've become in each other's absence.

It doesn't. This whole time, they’ve been people trying to figure out how to love each other. That's why they're here, trying. Working for it.

“When I came back, we said we didn’t know what this was going to be”, he says.

Ginny wraps her arms around his waist, drinking him in. "Seems pretty clear to me now."

"You think?"

She squints at him, grinning. "Surprised, are you?"

“Just don't really believe it yet”, he says softly, and Ginny realises that is something else they’re going to have to talk about some day. But they have so much of this summer still ahead of them, as many summers as they want in which to talk and figure it out. Right now, she puts her hand on the back of his neck and pulls herself on her tiptoes to kiss him again, and he’s kissing her back like it’s the only thing he’s ever really wanted to do.

Maybe that says it all, for now.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello again! Hope you liked it. I've got some ironing to do now, which is truly awful, so please feel free to leave a comment if you want to. It lets me know you enjoyed the fic AND makes the chores more bearable. :)


End file.
